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The side hustle from hell

blog.jacobstechtavern.com

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Re: The side hustle from hell

#141

Post by absolutelastone »

icedchai wrote: post #96
wibbily wrote: post #9

Currently at a startup that did the same thing wrt having their app built overseas. Protip: don't. Endless bullshit, excruciating trying to get anything out of them. We ended up with an app just like this guy's, locked aspect ratio and all. If I find another startup whose product is an app, and they can't find a local developer to write that app, I'm running. Why outsource your core product!?

This is very common. Lofty idea folks often see developers as a commodity, so why not just outsource to the cheapest bidder? You might luck out and get a smart person who doesn't know what they're worth yet... but, 9 out of 10 times, you get what you pay for.

If you don't know the value of what you are buying you are most likely to get even less than what you payed for. In the story they basically got scammed by overseas shops who probably pocketed most of the money and farmed out the effort to minimally-skilled and minimally-paid developers who were in way over their heads.

Re: The side hustle from hell

#142

Post by icedchai »

absolutelastone wrote: post #141
icedchai wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very common. Lofty idea folks often see developers as a commodity, so why not just outsource to the cheapest bidder? You might luck out and get a smart person who doesn't know what they're worth yet... but, 9 out of 10 times, you get what you pay for.

If you don't know the value of what you are buying you are most likely to get even less than what you payed for. In the story they basically got scammed by overseas shops who probably pocketed most of the money and farmed out the effort to minimally-skilled and minimally-paid developers who were in way over their heads.

Totally true. If you can't supervise the work, at least minimally, you're going to be taken advantage of.

Re: The side hustle from hell

#143

Post by bityard »

cafard wrote: post #111
bityard wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ultimately people tend to have a fairly personal relationship with their local mechanic. This is the money line. And it goes for all skilled trade work. Mechanics, plumbers, building contractors, roofers. Most of the people doing this work are just surprisingly bad at it, especially for how much they charge for it. It takes a LOT of time and effort to find someone good. I'd even lump doctors and dentists into this.…

> Most of the people doing this work are just surprisingly bad at it, especially for how much they charge for it. A friend quotes a sometime co-worker of his: This is C+ world, and if you can do a solid B- you won't starve.

Yes, exactly! I keep telling my kids that literally just consistently showing up and doing the work you are asked to do will put you far ahead of most of your peers. I'm not sure they believe me now, but eventually they will.

Re: The side hustle from hell

#144

Post by throwaway13024 »

jakey_bakey wrote: post #18
juliansimioni wrote: post #5

Like many, I also had an experience like this in my younger days: obviously unfit product, early prototype made by bottom-of-the-barrel contractors, co-founders who can't code, no salary, no users. I got lucky, and spent only a few months while not working that hard. But at the same time, this quote hits home: >I was doing a startup. I was executing, and for the first time in my professional life I wasn’t insulated f…

Right? I literally can't even call it a proper warning because of how much I took out of it. My whole career was jumpstarted by my second startup (we only got to preseed but it was a great two years) and there's no way I'd have been as good a fit without this experience

I had a similar wake-up call when I joined a startup. I had over a decade experience working in stable companies, but I learned so much in a short time.

What surprised me the most, was that I did not improve much technically, as we chose well known technologies to get the job done. Focusing on product over tech was one of the best decisions we made.I also learned to make compromises and accept some technical debt in order to get the product out in time. You get a much deeper view of the business needs when you work in a smaller group.

Re: The side hustle from hell

#145

Post by throwaway13024 »

praptak wrote: post #58
ChuckMcM wrote: post #16

I love this story. Why? Because it is the story of so many startups. I was so perplexed in the mid-90's when the dot com "boom" had started by people who wanted to do a "startup" but had no idea what that meant. Like the author, people with a feeling of Destiny that they would be some leader of something that everyone talked about. I had the same beliefs when I left Sun where clearly I would never be "famous" but by…

A million monkeys with a million typewrites will statistically have one lucky monkey who creates an extremely successful product which also looks very dumb and very unconvincing ("Srsly? You want to make money from random people hosting strangers in their own rooms?" Bang, AirBnB) The problem is selection bias. A startup is 3 monkeys tops, so the chances of that are appropriately low and if the product looks dumb and…

I joined a startup after working for 10+ years in regular companies and there was an incredible mix of highly competent and experienced people who knew how to get things done and were willing to put their egos aside to grow the product. As a small group, we made a product that was easy to sell. It was our market's "Iphone" moment. Our competitors were shaken and concerned because of our momentum and modern approach (they used Windows software on a yearly update schedule, while we were based on ios/android/web and updated daily).

I don't think the founder realised how lucky they were to have this combination of people, as this was their first startup after years in enterprise sales. There were other competitors that started around the same time as us, but they failed to deliver. I don't think we were necessarily better at developing, sales or marketing individually, but as a team we were able to work together really well.

When the founder raised a significant amount of money, they decided it was time to scale up and become a "real" company with proper hierarchy, reporting lines and processes. They hired people from FAANG who had impressive resumes, but were more concerned with titles and proving themselves. Constant rewrites, re-orgs and workshops to improve working processes made sure that progress halted, and most of the original team left. Today, the product is still alive as a minor actor, but they lost a lot of momentum and the competitors had time to launch their own "cloud" products.

It was painful at the time, but now I look back and I see it as an important lesson.

Re: The side hustle from hell

#146

Post by indoorcat »

jakey_bakey wrote: post #135
indoorcat wrote: post #109

Extremely relatable. I was the first technical hire for a startup that ultimately failed last year. I did at least have a (below market) salary, and there were no outsourcing headaches, but I really did spend an inordinate amount of my time trying to perfect a product that the founders had no idea how to market. I certainly learned a lot, though it made me a little cynical about startups and the tech industry in gene…

I find it's all about hitching your wagon to the right horses

That’s the trick, isn’t it. It’s just so hard to figure out which horses are the right ones and which ones are going to bolt off track. In my case, the founders seemed to have good bonafides - former execs from big name tech companies - but had very limited startup experience. Turns out it takes a different skill set to build a company from zero versus running an already successful one.
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